1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to an apparatus and method for localizing a sound source, and, more particularly, to a hardware structure which can localize a sound source in real time using both a buffer, employing a dual port structure, and a plurality of registers for respective channels.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general sound processing, the localization of a sound source generating sound is very important because the principal information required for the analysis of subsequently acquired sound and the detection of the contents of the sound is provided. Therefore, to achieve this localization, there has been proposed a method of arranging a plurality of microphones to exhibit uniform characteristics with respect to the direction of a sound source, and localizing the sound source using the time difference between the times at which sound from the sound source arrives at the respective microphones. Generally, such a method is accomplished by repeating step-by-step calculations, and the performance thereof has already been proven in general-purpose computers using a software-based method.
However, in order to determine a correlation between sound signals acquired from respective channels from the standpoint of the characteristics of a sound source localization method, the sound signals must be compared with each other while sound signals acquired for a predetermined period of time are moved with respect to a time coordinate axis, and such a comparison must be repeated a number of times corresponding to the number of permutations of a microphone set. Accordingly, when an existing software-based method based on sequential processing is used, a lot of calculation time is required. With regard to such a calculation time, as the length of a sound signal to be calculated is increased in order to accurately localize a sound source, the amount of calculation increases exponentially. In particular, in the case of sound source localization, the necessity thereof is emphasized as the function of an intelligent sensor in applications such as domestic robots or intelligent vehicles. However, such an excessive amount of calculation and the excessive calculation time may limit processing in the case of small-sized embedded systems, thus causing problems in actual applications.